Understanding the Emergence of Conventions in Multi-Agent Systems.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate techniques via which a group of autonomous agents can reach a global agreement on the use of social conventions by using only locally available information. Such conventions play a central role in naturally-occurring social systems, and there are good reasons for supposing that they will play a similarly important role in artificial social systems. Following a short review of conventions and their use in distributed artificial intelligence, we present a...